Berlin Coquette

Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933

by Jill Suzanne Smith

Publication Year: 2014

During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the “New Morality” articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the “New Woman.”

Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women's financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.

Title Page, Series Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Berlin’s Bourgeois Whores

In the winter of 1988, the women of Hydra organized a “Whores’ Ball” (Hurenball)
in West Berlin. Hydra, a support organization founded in 1980 by prostitutes and
their advocates, actively lobbies for sex workers’ civil rights and the elimination of
the social and moral stigma attached to prostitution. The 1988 ball raised funds for
Hydra’s social initiatives, including extensive outreach to economically disadvantaged...

1. Sex, Money, and Marriage: Prostitution as an Instrument of Conjugal Critique

“As long as marriage exists, so will prostitution,” wrote Georg Simmel in an essay
published in the Social Democratic weekly Die Neue Zeit in 1892.1 As Simmel’s
proclamation suggests, turn-of-the-century debates surrounding prostitution were
inextricably linked to discussions of the current state of marriage and its possible
reform. Although on the surface bourgeois morality dictated that prostitution...

2. Righteous Women and Lost Girls:Radical Bourgeois Feminists and the Fight for Moral Reform

In 1907, the Berlin feminist Anna Pappritz published a collection of prostitutes’ biographies
entitled Die Welt, von der man nicht spricht! (The World of Which One
Dares Not Speak!). A tireless critic of regulated prostitution, Pappritz directed the
Berlin chapter of the International Abolitionist Federation (IAF), an organization
that fought to end state regulation, its policing of prostitutes, and its implicit protection...

3. Naughty Berlin? New Women, New Spaces, and Erotic Confusion

If traditional bourgeois morality and social structures came under fire in Wilhelmine
Berlin, then the First World War, the political revolution of 1918 and
1919, and the inflation years that followed “destroyed conventional notions of respectability
and faith in authority.”1 Turn-of-the-century activism on the part of social
reformers and progressive feminists certainly laid the groundwork for change...

4. Working Girls: White-Collar Workers and Prostitutes in Late Weimar Fiction

In the later years of the Weimar Republic, public offi cials grappled with the overt
expression of female sexuality and struggled to redefi ne prostitution in light of new
public health legislation. On October 1, 1927, the Law to Combat Venereal Diseases
(Reichsgesetz zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten; RGBG) went
into effect, and with it, prostitution was offi cially decriminalized. Former “morals...

Conclusion: Berlin Coquette

Without question, between the years 1890 and 1933, Berlin was known as a city of
whores.1 Berlin-based writers, artists, social reformers, journalists, municipal politicians,
police officials, and prostitutes themselves acknowledged this, and many
of them fed this image. Consider, for example, the voices that emanate from various
documents of the Weimar era: “Sexual intercourse with prostitutes is unavoidable...

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